Chapter Seventy Eight; Cigarettes, Snot and Team Pandora

“See this shirt?” I smirk and point the question to Ted, the guy across the table from me, “It says Team Bonita. Not. Team Ted.”

Ted and Bonita are my friends. And they are breaking up after a year-long romance. And Bonita sat on my front step and bawled for, oh, like two hours or something the night before. (I still have her snot on the shoulder of my t-shirt if you want me to produce the evidence from my laundry pile.)

So let’s just say I wasn’t too happy to see Ted when he sauntered up to our table last weekend.

Mix those circumstances all together with a couple of drinks on my part, shake well, and . . .Viola! My instant smart ass takes over.

Our friends swoop in and gloss things over after my bitchy commentary but I still decide to scratch my face with my middle finger as I absently glance around the room avoiding eye contact with Ted.

What?

You’d have done the same thing.

But the truth is that was a booze induced reaction on my part. The sober and thinking version of Audra knows full well people are too complex, too grey. The only place you can find black and white is on a piano.

Ted has his feelings and Bonita has hers. Honestly, they’re both good people. I hate that their relationship is ending and that I have had a front row seat to some of that pain, but unless one of them is Jesus, they both contributed to something that in the end they could not build a future on.

It is sad and it sucks but if we didn’t have this element of humanity song writers and poets would be up shit crick because they’d have zippo for material.

Emotion is the architecture of our souls. Our logic gets us through our days and our lives and our jobs but our emotions are what make us feel alive.

Or sometimes, like Bonita . . .

. . . like we’re dying.

She came over again to talk a few days later.

She smoked a cigarette. I poured two glasses of wine. And we sat on my brick steps once again in the autumn air and watched the sun set through the towering elm trees on my street.

She cried.

I cried.

I tried to make her laugh.

She chuckled through her tears.

And then she cried some more.

But I just held my friend and let her sob it all out, “Shhh . . . it’s okay, I know, I know,” I muttered timeless fragments of comfort. The mother in me did for my grown up girlfriend what I do for my little girl after she falls off her bike. Although Bonita's fall can't be fixed with a bandaid and a boo boo kiss.

All I can do for her pain is simply sit next to her.

Because Bonita and Ted aren’t going to make it.

But that doesn’t mean love doesn’t win.

Ending relationships that weren’t meant to last in the first place is exactly the path that can lead us to that authentic life and the love we are all searching for. It can be a painful and faltering journey, as love and loss are so entwined. So much so that many people become too jaded and give up completely. Resigning themselves to a life of solitude and likening even trying to date as opening Pandora’s box. Not worth unleashing that much sorrow.

But people forget that in Greek mythology, yes, Pandora’s box contained ills, toils and sickness . . . but most importantly it also contained hope.

I tell Bonita all this.

And she nods silently.

And thanks me for listening. For not judging. For not bashing Ted in the end. For trying to help her look through this fog to see a happier future.

But for now all I can do is drink wine with her in the cool fall air, get more of her snot on my shoulder, and whisper silly jokes in her ear as she cries.

Because there is only one team I want to be on in this life.

The hopeful one. The one that doesn't give up. The one that goes through the crap but does not waver in its belief that through suffering comes clarity and life lessons that lead to authenticity.

Team Pandora.

The promise that even our painful paths can lead us . . .

. . . to love.